FiveThirtyEight recently answered a question on the demographics of heaven. That’s a rather difficult one, though they made an admirable attempt by framing it instead as the demographics of the entirety of humanity that’s ever lived, and thus the demographics of all those that have ever died. Their takeaway was that a total of 100.8 billion people have lived and ultimately died on Earth (the current population is 7.3 billion for those keeping track at home). That means that the dead outnumber the living 14 to 1. That’s a lot of ghosts!

Here’s a table from the Population Reference Bureau that I’ve helpfully modified to capture the information most relevant to our needs.

And here’s a chart from FiveThirtyEight plotting out that population increase over time as a nice looking curve.

The main thing I want you to take away here is that despite the human population increasing exponentially in recent years, the vast majority of the approximately 100.8 million people who have ever died did so prior before modern times. 96% of everyone who has ever died did so before the year 1900 A.D. Let’s break it down by the subdivisions used by the Population Reference Bureau:

Our species has been around a loooong time. Setting the “start” of humanity at 50,000 B.C., 50% of all humans who have ever lived will have died before the Roman Empire fell.

This information is very useful as the total number of dead is directly proportional to the total number of theoretical ghosts that could exist. Of course, we have absolutely no good statistics on how often a human death results in a ghost. But let’s assume that ghosts typically result from violent deaths. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker postulates that the overall amount of violent deaths has broadly been declining over the history of the human species, and that despite the number and sheer scale of wars in the modern era, we are living in probably the most peaceful time in the history of our species due to the long periods of relative stability most nations currently enjoy.

If we accept Pinker’s claims in association with our assumption that ghosts result predominantly from violent deaths, we are left with the understanding that ghosts are more likely to be created the further back you go in time. Combine this with what we’ve learned about when the majority of human deaths occurred and we’re left with the result that most ghosts you may encounter on a day to day basis are likely very, very old.

Again: It’s impossible for us to know the exact conversion rate of the dead into ghosts (whether it’s “all” or “none”). We also have no way of knowing at what rate ghosts “decay.” Even if we accept the possibility that the conversion rate is low and the half-life of ghosts is high enough that there are not a lot of prehistoric ghosts hanging around these days, there’s a few broad things we can assume about the average ghost you might encounter.

1.)    Ghosts are tiny as all get out

The diet of the average human has over time become increasingly better, especially in the last century. While genetics are of course a major factor, diet can have a huge impact on physical and mental development. How much difference does the diet make on your physique? North Korea had a number of major famines in the past half century, which appears to have had a noticeable impact on its populace. Here’s a popular image of a North Korean soldier between an American and South Korean one.

This increase in size is a relatively recent development. Here’s a figure from Our World In Data plotting the height of male skeletons in Europe over the last two millennia.

Why has diet improved so much? Most of it is tied modern agricultural knowledge (we’ll get to that shortly) allowing us to provide nutritionally healthier foods to the population at large, regardless of their relative wealth. Historically, the vast majority of the population was profoundly poor. They were likely unhealthier overall as a result, and lived considerably harsher lives than the well-to-do.  The diet of most commoners was almost entirely grain-based, supplemented by the occasional seasonal vegetables and with a bare minimum of protein.

What does this all mean? It means that if you were to encounter a ghost, chances are it would be short, it would be tiny, it would look pretty unhealthy, and it’d be frankly intimidated by our modern exercise culture (ghost do you even lift bro???)

2.)    Ghosts know an awful lot about outdated farming techniques and little else.

As most ghosts when alive were likely poor and lived very subsistence-driven lifestyles, chances are they didn’t have even the most precursory of education. They lived hard, frugal, and simple lives. Odds are they were involved in agrarian farming. This is how the vast majority of human population has lived through our history.

Even assuming a farm ghost was a particularly adept farmer and well-versed with how to take care of animals and/or handle their crops-of-choice, it is exceedingly likely that what they believed was inaccurate, possibly self-destructive to a degree. There’s also a pretty good chance that the crops and animals they raised no longer even exist.

Fritz Machlup postulated that there is a half-life of knowledge, the amount of time that has to elapse before 50% of the knowledge in a particular field or knowledge is superseded or shown to be untrue. Given that the highly likelihood that most of those that died were farmers a way, way long time ago, the decay of the truth over this long span of time means that an awful lot of what they believed was the most effective approach to farming was either untrue or has been now replaced with better, more effective farming methods. We’ve got tractors. We play God and genetically engineer our food to be inherently better. We rotate crops! That farmer was lucky to have a plow. If they did, I’ve got pretty good odds that their plow wasn’t even very good.

Of course, shaping food to our needs isn’t a new thing; we’ve been cultivating plants for ages. Take for example the Brassica oleracea, also known as the wild cabbage. Here are the different plants that have been cultivated from it:

These were all developed at various points over our history. A ghost that pre-dates a particular variation would have absolutely no idea what it is, or how to raise it. For example, the modern Brussels sprout was first cultivated in the 13th Century. If that ghost is any older than that, there’s no way he’ll have any idea what it is. Furthermore, we’re a pretty globalized society now. There are an awful lot of common modern food items that our long dead and very misinformed ancestors would have no goddamn idea about. Show a Roman ghost a corn, I dare you.

3.)    Ghosts are dumb as hell

When making an intelligence quotient (IQ) test, the test is initially standardized against a sample group of test-takers in order to set the average test result to a score of 100. This “100” score is intended to reflect a population mean. Those that score above 100 on the standardized test are “more intelligent” than the population average, those below are “less intelligent”.  The test is reevaluated and adjusted over time in order to maintain that mean score.

When these tests are reevaluated and standardized again, they are often compared against the previous results for reference. The outcome of these comparisons is fascinating: as a broad trend over the history of IQ testing, the population average score prior to standardization is actually higher than in prior evaluations. In other words, a person scoring a 100 on the current IQ test (the average) would on average score above 100 on an older one. This trend on improved IQ test scores is known as the Flynn effect (named for James R. Flynn, who has done much to document this trend).

If you take IQ tests at face value, as a measure of fluid and crystallized human intelligence, we as a population appear to be getting smarter over time. While I am personally fairly skeptical of the actual value of IQ test scores as a concrete measure of human intelligence, this broad top-level trend is itself very interesting. What drives this?

As mentioned previously, our dead-as-hell ancestors did not have the best of diets and health. Not only did this impact the growth of their bodies, it also impacted the growth of their brains. So not only has the height of humans been increasing in the last century due our improved diets and increased health overall (thanks modern medicine!), but our intelligence on average appears to be increasing as well.

We’ve also been including more and more of the population in long-term primary and secondary education. Even the simplest things as basic mathematics, reading, and writing have grasped by the entirety of our population. These are astounding intellectual techniques that are first grasped then mastered by our youngest children, and were previously unavailable to the rest of the population in our earlier history.

I mean, consider Saint Ambrose, a 4th century bishop from Milan. It was considered astounding, almost miraculous, that he was capable of reading without moving his lips. Here’s a quote from Saint Augustine’s Confessions:  “When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Chances are you read that quote itself in total silence. Saint Augustine would find you incredible. This is what the march of time has accomplished!

Ghosts are as a whole probably not the brightest bunch. I’d even venture to guess that an awful lot of them are in fact dumb as fuck. if you asked a ghost even the simplest of IF A TRAIN LEFT CHICAGO AT 50 MILES PER HOUR mathematical problem, they would likely be totally stumped by it. They also probably wouldn’t know where Chicago is, or what a train is. Or maybe even speak English for that matter. And then you could just start reading a book in front of them quietly and they’d be freaking the fuck out.

4.)    Ghosts are racist as fuck

The majority of humans lived in times when slavery was considered a blessing, and ethnic purges were a matter of course. I think it’s safe to say on this alone that ghosts are assholes. #fuckghosts

5.)    Ghosts are easily scared by even the most simple electronic devices

Given how ancient, uninformed, and not particularly ghosts are, it is not a huge assumption to presume that they are by and large a superstitious lot. They lived, grew old, and died deathly afraid of basically everything. Clouds. Odd looking rocks. Eagles. Clouds that look like odd looking rocks and may be hiding eagles. Every single goddamn thing was an ill portent and a sign that god hated them and werewolves were going to besiege their tiny hovels.

Let’s face it: they didn’t exactly have a lot of great frame of reference to go on. Stability meant safety, and so novel occurrences and events were almost always bad news. Meanwhile, our modern life is an unending STORM of novel things happen.  We love it! Shining a flashlight on a ghost would be goddamn terrifying to them. Ghosts don’t get out much. “Ah, I’m trapped in a horrible half-existence between life and death! All I knew in life was toil and a violent end, and all I know in death is pain and emptiness and OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING, SOME KIND OF HELLROD? THAT GUY IS LIKE SIX FEED TALL AND BUFF AS ALL GET OUT?!?!”

I’m not even sure ghosts would be particularly good at spooking us if they wanted to. Given the uninformed idiocy of the average ghost (its statistics folks, deal with it), I’d honest be surprised if they would even think to put a bucket over the door, let alone bleeding walls. Bleeding walls are goddamn innovative.

This is why all the best horror writers are in fact not ghosts. That’s straight facts.

So let’s review!

Despite the increase in population in the last century, the majority of humans who ever lived died prior to the modern era. Combined with the decreasing rate of violent deaths, it is a statistical likelihood that most ghosts were created from fairly ancient peoples. They’re really dang old. Given that the vast majority of human population have lived in relative poverty and engaged in a subsistence lifestyle, we can assume that the majority of ghosts are tiny ignorant racists that are superstitious and liable to flee at the sight of a simple iPhone. Not only does a ghost have more reason to be afraid of you than you of it, it’s probably not even much of a threat either way!

That’s not to say this is true of all ghosts, I’m sure there’s plenty of ghosts (if they exist) that contradict all of the suppositions I’ve previously made. But on average, ghosts are probably shmucks. That’s just math.

It will be interesting going forward as our population continues to explode to see what kind of ghosts we make in our terrible ends. Will we too be really shitty in our cyberpunk dystopian future? What of the cyborg ghosts? Will they just be floating heads, or do they have robot arms still as ghosts? These are questions we just don’t have answers to yet.